Costume Designer Nancy Steiner Explains Her Role in the New Twin Peaks

If you've dressed up for Halloween like Kurt Cobain in "Come as You Are" or Kirsten Dunst in The Virgin Suicides, if you've channeled Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine or Gwen Stefani in her No Doubt music videos, you've done it because Nancy Steiner made those looks famous, iconic in ways that distinguish you from the cat-eared masses.

Steiner has worked in Hollywood since the mid-'80s, scoring her first gig at NaNa, a punk clothing mecca and a destination for stylists who need to outfit bands for their music videos. She was the woman who always seemed to find the stylists the best stuff. "A few of them said, 'If you ever decide to leave, you should come work for me,'" she remembers. "And that's what I did."

Nancy Steiner.

Courtesy Nancy Steiner

Steiner also dressed No Doubt, R.E.M., Smashing Pumpkins, even Nirvana in the early '90s. It was Steiner who put Kurt Cobain in that famed green sweater―a geriatric-but-not look that became inextricably linked to Nirvana when the music video for "Come As You Are" shot the band to fame.

Steiner eventually moved on to movies and then television, discovering she had a particular knack for working with famously opinionated indie directors. She and Sofia Coppola met through mutual friends. She's worked with Todd Haynes, Wim Wenders, Yorgos Lanthimos. She just wrapped up on the set of Twin Peaks, a revival that's bound to inspire a new generation of inadvertent Steiner acolytes. Halloween is only nine months away.

How did you decide to make the switch from music videos to movies?

You know, I haven't done music videos in forever. I mean, I just did a [Red Hot] Chili Peppers video because they're friends of mine, but I really don't do video anymore. Back in the day, when MTV was all the rage, we were in the most creative part of the business. There was no template. It turned out to be an amazing breeding ground for film directors. And all the video directors became film directors—the good ones. I followed them there.

Now I work on a lot of smaller films because, to me, it's a much freer arena. When you work on the bigger films, every decision goes through so many levels of approval. That's why I love the smaller films, where you don't have all these people lurking over your shoulder. You can really just make something that's right and cool, even if it doesn't fit the mold.

Nancy Steiner and Kirsten Dunst.

Courtesy Nancy Steiner

Has your work had any effect on your style, how you dress?

Yes. When I started I was still wearing '40s dresses and vintage clothes. Those clothes were great, but they didn't suit how much physical work there is. I have become very minimal in my dress. And now, I almost wear a uniform of jeans and a T-shirt. I've become a little more just simple.

Sofia Coppola, Nancy Steiner, and Bill Murray

Courtesy Nancy Steiner

I'm not sure people really think about that—the physical toll that it takes to get people dressed every day.

And it's not just dressing people. It's finding the clothes. You're on your feet all day. When you're prepping a job, you're either shopping or you're in rental houses climbing up ladders, pulling apart racks of clothing that are all crammed together. Then you're carrying all that stuff and you're pulling the rack, and you're loading your car, you're unloading your car, you're hanging everything up, you're organizing it. It's very physical to prep a job.

And then, when you're in a room with an actor and you're dressing them to become someone they're not usually, that's physical, too. It's not as physical as the prep, but it's just a lot of work. Some designers don't pull—they have assistants to do that. But mostly I am very, very hands-on.

'Lost in Translation,' 'The Virgin Suicides,' the Nirvana videos—you've created some iconic looks. Where do you find inspiration?

At the time that I did the Nirvana video, I was dating Kevin Kerslake, who directed a bunch of the Nirvana videos. And I'd known Courtney [Love] since I was, like, 16 years old. Of course I was excited. I was already a fan. I come from punk rock, and that's my tribe. And I'm not always a fan of the people I'm working with.

Nirvana on set.

Courtesy Nancy Steiner

Everyone in the band was a thrifter, so it wasn't a hard job. I went out and pulled a lot of cool stuff and let them choose what they wanted. It was so casual. It was like, 'Here, what do you like?' That's the way a lot of it happened in the beginning. We mixed it all up, saw what worked.

A lot of my jobs happened that way, through people I knew. Sofia [Coppola] and I were in the same kind of pack, and she asked me to do Virgin Suicides. I was so thrilled because basically that was my world. I grew up in the '70s. I went home and read the book immediately. And then when we got to set, I took all of my yearbooks with me. Granted, I grew up on the West Coast and this was the [Midwest], but it's all the same elements. I felt immediately like I could tell this story—not that it was an easy job, but that I knew it. I knew what it was supposed to look like. I felt like I was dressing myself in junior high. I remember dressing the young boys and doing the fittings and saying, 'You have to wear your pants higher. I know it doesn't feel right to you. You're used to wearing them on your hips and hanging baggy, but that's the way they were worn those days.'

On the set of

Coutesy Nancy Steiner

I loved it all, but I really loved the prom dresses. I was just convinced that their mother was so frugal that she would have made the dresses from one pattern. I designed them myself.

Do you find that you often have to give actors a pep talk to say, 'You can really pull this off'?

Yes. The fitting room is basically a therapy session. It's a psychological thing, you know? Sometimes people are not into it, and you have to talk them into it and tell them how great it's going to be. When I've had resistance in the past, I have to just say, 'Well, let's see what the director wants.' I kind of have an out in that way.

On The Good Girl, I was dressing Jennifer Aniston and Zooey Deschanel, who I had worked with on a video. She was an up-and-coming actress then, and we knew each other and liked each other, but she came in the room with a totally different idea from what [the director] Miguel [Arteta] and I had talked about. So when she saw my rack of clothing she was like, 'Oh, that's not what I was thinking at all.' I said, 'Well this is what we have today, so let's just try some stuff on and see how it feels.' She was really happy about it in the end, but she came in with a whole different idea in her head about who she was supposed to be.

It's just really intimate. These people, they're all just like us and they've got all their quirks and hang-ups. You would not believe the ladies that come into my room and say that they're fat. It's a very vulnerable situation. I have to gain their trust immediately when they walk in the door.

Who's someone you've dressed that you felt really transformed on set?

When we did No Doubt "Don't Speak." Gwen [Stefani] didn't wear dresses back then. She wore midriff tops and tight jeans, and I really had to talk her into wearing that polka-dot navy dress. That was very much my style at the time. Actually, I'm pretty sure that dress came out of my closet.

Gwen Stefani on the set of

Courtesy Nancy Steiner

And then for my first film, Safe, I dressed Julianne Moore as a Sherman Oaks housewife in the '80s. We made that movie in the early '90s—'93 [or] '94—and fashion had already changed so much. We no longer had shoulder pads, everything was kind of getting into minimalist, clean lines―a little more futuristic.

We made Julianne into this fragile little Valley housewife creature by telling that story with the clothes, with the color. The palette was very light and pastel, and I just felt like she'd turned into this little cloud.

When you're working on a project like 'Twin Peaks,' where you know expectations for the clothes, for the scene, for the ambience is going be sky-high, how do you prepare? Does that get in your head at all?

Oh, God, yes. I would say Twin Peaks is the first project I've ever done like that, where there's already such a huge fan base, and everybody has an opinion. I felt a big weight taking that job because I want to do the right thing for the fans [and] I want to do the right thing for David [Lynch], of course.

The cast from the original

Getty Images

Since you started in the business, slowly but surely women directors and women executives have become more common. Have you noticed that? When you're approached for a movie, do you think about how many women are involved?

Oh, I want more women in our business in every department.

But you've worked on mostly male sets, given how long your career has been.

Yes, mostly male. Pretty much the only female directors I've worked with on films are Valerie Faris [and Sofia Coppola]. So I am thrilled that more women are getting involved. I just think women bring a great vibe to set. There are always the bad apples, but I think that women have a different way of working things out than men do. Women think in more of a compassionate way. We go about our work differently. I think women are more open to collaborating, and, generally, I just feel like we're better problem solvers. And you deal with a lot of machismo in this business as a woman. I have to say that I've had a lot of male producers kind of laugh off what we do in the costume department or make it seem less important. A lot of the time, it is a boys' club, and you just don't feel like you're ever going to crack it.

And of course, it is a predominantly white business as well, which you could attribute to much bigger race problems. I just watched Ava DuVernay's new movie 13th. And it had such an impact on me. African Americans and Hispanics and everyone who's not white has been pushed down and not given the opportunities that I've been given. I'm very aware of that.

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